Dobbs Report Links Leprosy and Immigration, But Numbers Don’t Hold Up

On Sunday, CBS fact-checked Lou Dobbs about a questionable number that has repeatedly popped up in the immigration debate.

Lou Dobbs (CNN photo)

As part of a “60 Minutes” segment about the CNN anchor and outspoken critic of illegal immigration, Lesley Stahl confronted Mr. Dobbs with what she said was a numerical error that had been broadcast on his show (CBS article here, and video here). In April 2005, as CNN correspondent Christine Romans was wrapping up a segment on diseases carried into the U.S. by undocumented immigrants, she told Mr. Dobbs, “The woman in our piece told us that there were about 900 cases of leprosy for 40 years. There have been 7,000 in the past three years.” But as Ms. Stahl said to Mr. Dobbs, federal government numbers show a total of 7,000 cases have been identified over the past 30 years, not three years. Mr. Dobbs responded, “If we reported it, it’s a fact.” When pressed, he added, “I’m the managing editor. And that’s the way we do business. We don’t make up numbers, Lesley.”

In an email, a CNN spokeswoman attributed the claim to a 2005 article by medical historian and anti-illegal immigration activist Madeleine Cosman in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. That article stated, “Leprosy, Hansen’s disease, was so rare in America that in 40 years only 900 people were afflicted. Suddenly, in the past three years America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy.” Ms. Cosman, who has since died, attributed those numbers to a 2003 report in the New York Times, but it appears she misrepresented the wording of that report. The Times article said, “While there were some 900 recorded cases in the United States 40 years ago, today more than 7,000 people have leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, as it is now called.” The Times wording suggests that the 7,000 figure represents total patients, not just new diagnoses — and doesn’t support Ms. Romans’s claim on the Dobbs show that “there were about 900 cases of leprosy for 40 years.”

The Times article didn’t identify the source of the numbers. A spokesman for the paper said he would look into it but hasn’t yet gotten back to me. If he does, I’ll update this post.

In response to my inquiry about whether Ms. Romans used the leprosy numbers improperly, Mr. Dobbs said through a CNN spokeswoman, “Christine Romans’s comments reflected what Dr. Cosman had said: That the number of active and current cases of leprosy had risen to and remained at more than 7,000 for the past three years as a result of improved reporting and unscreened illegal immigration primarily from Southeast Asia.”

But federal data dispute the suggestion that there has been a recent surge in leprosy cases, and I couldn’t find any evidence suggesting illegal immigrants have any significant impact on the numbers one way or the other. The National Hansen’s Disease Program, a unit of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has been collecting reports from health care providers and agencies in its registry since 1894. According to the program, there were 6,500 people living with the disease in 2005. Notably, new cases peaked at 456 in 1983, and hit a 35-year low of 76 in 2000. Since then, the number of new cases has climbed to 166 in 2005 — which is still lower than the number of new cases of leprosy detected each year in the 20-year period ending in 1994, even as the overall U.S. population has steadily increased. The program attributed the sharp increase in the 1970s and 1980s to an influx of Indo-Chinese refugees. But there hasn’t been a similar spike in leprosy cases in recent years, a period which, according to critics of illegal immigration, has seen a surge in the number of undocumented immigrants. (Estimates about the number of illegal immigrants are themselves questionable, as I wrote in a column last year.)

“Lou Dobbs Tonight” was certainly not the only media outlet to publicize the leprosy numbers as part of a broader argument that illegal immigration poses health risks. Since the Times article in 2003, the stats have appeared on Fox News and in newspapers’ news pages, opinion columns and letters to the editor — often with similar confusion about the timeframe, to make the increase seem more marked. (See more on new cases of the disease and overall prevalence from the World Health Organization).

About The Numbers

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